A short story for your, I hope, enjoyment. Please forgive any grammatical or spelling errors. I have always been a horrible speller.
She was gone.
Sometimes she disappears. Not like she goes invisible or takes off or anything like that. It’s more like she just goes blank. I don’t think most people even notice. But I do. Buck probably does too. How could her own father not see the lack of her in her eyes?
She showed up on Buck’s doorstep when she was four. To hear him tell it, one day he opened the door and she was just there. No note, no explanation other than her first words to her father: “Momma says I live with you now.” He let her in, gave her a Pop Tart, and they’d been thick as thieves ever since. He never questioned that she was his. Looking at her face was just like staring into his. So when the color would drain away from her, leaving her just cardboard cut out of herself…well, he would have to know.
I know because I love her so much it makes my heart hurt. I always have. My family moved here when I was thirteen, and the first time those long curls walked by, I knew. I knew like I knew our dog had fleas. I was hers, forever.
She was too pretty. I was a dumb guy with nothing. I could barely keep myself in high school. She was smart. The girls hated her because of her pretty hair and her easy smarts. They were cruel when she was looking, crueler when she wasn’t. She didn’t seem to care about any of it. Boys didn’t ask her out. She thought is was because no one liked her. I could tell her that it was because none of us ever dreamed she’d say yes, but she wouldn’t believe me anyway, so what would be the point?
I stare at her across the room and I can see the lack of her. It makes me so sad. I want to wrap my arms around her, but touching her when she’s like this makes me sadder. She catches my eyes on her. I just shrug and she gives me a big smile. It gets bigger when she disappears, maybe she thinks overdoing it will trick me. But no smile can change that she is now is black and white. I sometimes wonder if she wishes people knew. She can tell me anything, and she would if she wanted me to know. So I smile back: a big toothy one that would make her giggle if she was really here. Nothing.
Year ago she went away to college, and came back different. She came back in love. She had been pretty before, but that happy it was actually hard to look at her. Harder still because of the jealousy gnawing at my gut like a hungry rat. That had been the first time she talked to me, at work, at the hardware store. She’d come in to pick up some things for Buck. She was so happy, I was staring. She remembered me from high school, she said so. I tried to think of something to say that she would take with her and think about again, but it was just nothing much. She says she remembers. She only says that cause it makes me happy to hear it.
All the sudden she’s next to me. Her fingers are just a little cold as they find their place around mine. I squeeze her fingers and she tries to care.
Coming here was a mistake. I felt it before we got here. The trip had been her idea. She’d gotten the invitation two weeks ago in the mail. She saw a chance to go to the city, to catch up with old college friends. I saw trouble tied with a little silk bow.
Calissa had been her roommate at college. I guess it was for all four years since she never mentioned another roommate. Calissa was getting married. She had invited us to come to the city for a big engagement party. They were renting out the top floor of a bar. It would be a chance to catch up, a chance for us to meet the new fiance and a chance for her to meet me. That had been handwritten on the thick, fibrous paper. When she said she wanted us to go I said I thought it would be fun. But later I figured the memories would take her down to the bottom.
We were standing at the bar watching a parade of people trample by. They were all fancy and smart and I knew I looked like a guy who would someday manage a hardware store. She looked like she could wade right in and no one would know she came from nowhere. No one would ever guess that she was with me. I squeezed her fingers, but she was looking off into the group. She might have been looking for him, but I didn’t think for a minute that Calissa would have invited him if she had also invited us. She didn’t talk much about college, so I had no idea if he was friends with Calissa. I’d wondered if the only reason she’d wanted to come was to see him, but I wasn’t allowed to ask about him so there was no way to know for sure.
“Rachel…come over here!” Calissa shouted at us.
I felt her fingers fall away from my hand. “Do you want to come?”
“Nah.” I said “I need to hold up the bar.”
She gave me a quick look, and I knew she didn’t want to talk to whomever Calissa had cornered, but what choice did she have?
She walks away and all I can do is watch. It’s all she needs from me now. I’ll stand here as longs as necessary. Let the other men stare, though it boils my blood, I know she doesn’t even see them. She might not be mine, but she’ll never be theirs. No doubt.
I go back into my memories and find our first kiss. It was behind the store, by the additional parking and the stacks of pallets and boxes. When she came home for the last time, she was gone. There were whispers about a broken engagement, about a great heartbreak that no one could gossip about because, hard as they tried, no one could even wrestle a single fact out of her or Buck. It grew to become the greatest mysterious event in the town’s history, even though it hadn’t even happened there. At the hands of the old biddies the story swung between him gallantly dying in a plane crash to save democracy and him skulking off to marry someone more in keeping with his social standing. But no one knew for sure. All I knew was that he’d sent her back to us broken and for that, I would kill him if I ever met him.
She had come back, though, and even her misery gave me some happiness. She would come into the store. I would always help her. Then she started coming in just to talk. She’d sit on a stool while I went about my job. She would come at closing and stay to talk while I finished up. It became our routine. Sometimes we would go out for something to eat if I was hungry. Sometimes I would just take her home. We were becoming friends. I would take that if it was all she could give.
That night, out back, I was having a last drag on my cigarette before taking her home. Even with the windows open she didn’t like me smoking in the truck. She was looking at me funny, this time with all her colors floating through and around her.
“Do you ever want to kiss me?” she asked.
“What.” I stammered back.
“Sometimes I think you want to kiss me, but you never do.” She looked down at her hands for just a second. I looked with her, noticing her wringing her fingers.
“I’ve wanted to kiss you since we were thirteen.” I said plainly. I wasn’t one to talk in circles. I wasn’t clever enough to be romantic. “It just never occurred to me you’d say yes.”
She looked at me sharply then, a little anger flashing in the corner of her eyes. No, not anger. Fear. Then it was gone.
She stood up, and I went to her, so nervous I almost forgot to step out my cigarette.
I put my hand on the small of her back and eased the warm curves of her to me. She never took her eyes off mine. The fear flashed again, but I could handle it. She could trust me even if she didn’t know it.
I had wanted to kiss her for so long I almost pulled her straight to the deep end. She hesitated just a second, a small pull back of her body and her spirit. I stopped, and she looked surprised. My lips were so close to hers I could taste her lip balm. I waited. It couldn’t have been long, but for me it felt like forever. Our eyes stayed locked together. I would know when she was ready.
“Matthew…” she whispered.
Every time she says my name I remember the feeling of that moment: her lips moving beneath mine. That was the moment I knew I would be hers forever. I was gone, and I took her with me. I kissed her hard. I had meant to be gentle and tender, but there hadn’t been a way to hold back the want in me. She wove her fingers through my hair, pulling me to her, and I knew heaven.
The kiss wasn’t as amazing as the fact that she wanted me to do it. She wanted me to kiss her. She wanted me.
Now, watching the shell of her wade through the bar back to me, I wonder if that’s enough.
We had settled into something after that kiss. It was more than friends, and less than soul mates. I worked and she did too, finding a job at the County Clerk’s office. I loved her and she let me. It worked.
I asked Buck once if he thought I was good enough for her. He didn’t think anyone was, but I was good people: solid and strong. I thought about asking about her broken engagement but quickly thought better of it. That was her story to tell.
She was disappearing less and less. I was happy. She was happy.
Then the invitation came and she wanted to go and we would go back to her college and everything would get all screwed up again no matter how solid and strong I was.
We had left the bar with a lot of “I’ll look for you on Facebook”‘s and “Can’t wait to see you again at the wedding”‘s. I shook a lot of faceless hands and she gave a lot of loveless hugs. We walked out to the truck and I lit a quick smoke. I needed one after the last few hours.
She got in the driver’s side of the truck, giving me a little look for having left the door unlocked. “Go ahead and get in” she said, “I want to show you something.”
I didn’t like this. She never drove. I never smoked in the truck with her. “I’ll drive” I offered.
“No, it’ll be faster if I do.” she said, and the truck rumbled to life like and angry bear.
We drove to a park rubbing up next to a hospital. There were lots of trees and some kind of memorial in the middle, but all I could think of was the sick people in the hospital rooms having to look out their windows at the healthy people playing in the park.
She didn’t take my hand, she didn’t have to. I’d follow her anywhere.
She wasn’t looking at the park. She was looking at the hospital. I tried to follow her gaze, but all I saw was window after window cut through the brick wall.
“Do you ever think about marrying me?” she asked.
“Everyday.” I answered without skipping a beat. It was the truth.
“But you don’t ask.” She said looking through me. What was she trying to find behind me?
“Not yet.” Again, it was the truth. I had never asked her because of the fear she would say no.
Her eyes came to mine, and I didn’t sense that I’d made her feel any better. Once again she looked at the hospital. Maybe she felt bad for the sick people too.
“I don’t think you should.” she whispered staring back at the brick.
I wanted to shake her, to yell at her that maybe, just maybe I’d be enough. But I stood there, knowing she had something to tell me and that shutting up and listening was the way to go.
“Three from the top, two from the right.” was all she said. I found the window, it didn’t look any different from the others. “She jumped out that window. Somehow she pried it open. It should have been locked.”
“Who?” I asked.
“My mother.” she said plainly.
Her mother? She had never even mentioned her mother to me before. Not even the old biddies gossiped about her Mother anymore. Buck had always acted like he couldn’t even remember her, after all, you meet a lot of girls when you’re in the Service. I figured she didn’t remember her either.
“When I was at college, here, not even five miles away. I didn’t know she was here until I got the call from the hospital. She had listed me as next of kin.”
“They told me she was really sick. She had mental illnesses, a whole list of them. That’s why she left me with Buck. She didn’t want me to see her, so she’d never tried to get in touch with me.”
“I don’t know if maybe she heard about the engagement. She was keeping up with me enough to know I was there at school…anyway, once she was dead they explained it all to me and I dealt with the arrangements and all that crap.”
She stopped. She was really gone now, but this was a new place. She wasn’t black and white. She was all red.
“I told him all about it. I was a mess. He was going to be my husband, he needed to know, I needed him to know. I was wild. Buck tried to help but he wasn’t what I wanted. I cried, I screamed, I needed.” She stopped again, choking on the words. I knew how the story ended. I wanted to hear her say it.
“And he left. He told me it was too much for him and he left. Like I was nothing.”
I would definitely kill him.
She was waiting. Most always I knew what she needed me to do, but right then I couldn’t decide if she wanted me to say something or not. This was a new gone. This was a gone where she wanted me with her.
“You are everything.” was all I could think of.
It was wrong. I saw how wrong it was move across her face. Then she was smiling at me, but it was wrong too.
“You want to kill him, don’t you?”
I was speechless. She knew me. She loved me.
“You are focusing on the wrong part of the story.” she said. “I have that,” she pointed at the deadly window “inside of me.” She stopped short, holding something back that she wanted to tell me. Then it spilled out of her in spite of herself. “I hate that fucking window.”
I looked at her. I looked through her. I could see the dark places that she went to surround her now like little black holes on her surface. She could be bat shit crazy. She could wake up one morning and be a different person from who she was now. There might be nothing I could do to save her from herself. I suddenly didn’t feel so solid or strong.
I finally looked away, back up at the window that had ruined her life a couple of times already.
“I don’t mind it so much.” I said. I could feel the look on her face, as if it was the stupidest thing she had ever heard.
“If she hadn’t been sick she would have never brought you to Buck. I would have never met you.”
She assumed I was missing the point again, but I didn’t stop.
“If she hadn’t died when she did you would have married a man that couldn’t be the man you need. You didn’t end up wasting any time on him.” I would still kill him though, she knew that.
“That brought you back to the store. To me. And even though you might disappear during the hard stuff, I never will.”
I turned to look at her. I needed her to see my resolve, my absolute belief that I would love her forever with the same ache I felt now. She looked at me, her eyes wide with surprise. “What do you mean, I disappear…?” She was waiting for an answer she already knew.
“Doesn’t matter. You always come back.”
She came up to me so slow it was hard to see her moving. When she was close enough I pulled her warm curves to me for a hug, but she whispered my name and kissed me so hard I couldn’t think. She led me back to the back seat of the truck and we were happy enough to bring all her colors back.
Clarissa’s wedding was a pompus, overblown mess of coordinating colors and loud music. I hated wearing the damn suit and pretending to give a crap about all these lousy people. We had gotten married at the County Clerk’s office on her lunch break. Buck and my parents were there. That was it. She was more beautiful in her work clothes than Clarissa could ever hope to be in her ridiculous layers of white. We had gone out for a steak dinner. No one made a toast. Buck gave us $200 and my parents gave me my grandmother’s china. We had spent most of the honeymoon in our living room when we weren’t in the bedroom. All the old biddies assumed we had to get married, but we were going to wait until I was manager at the store to have any babies. I was hers and she was mine. That would be plenty for now.
The DJ put on some stupid love song and Rachel turned to me and offered her hand. We walked out onto the floor and we swayed in time to the music.
“It’s our first dance.” she said softly so no one else would hear. I took her hand, her fingers a little cold where they pressed into my hands.
“Good thing you never saw me dance before we got married.” I said.
She gave me her real smile, the one that shone like the sun.
I was gone.
